Army, Rebels Vie for Hearts of People in Chiapas : Mexico: Soldiers tear down roadblocks and hand out food. Civil disobedience marks support for Zapatistas.

Leticia Diaz awoke before dawn to the din of trucks and a bulldozer rumbling up the rutted dirt road that runs through this village of wood-plank huts in the southern mountains of the southern state of Chiapas.

She ran down to where villagers had piled rocks waist-high in a makeshift barricade meant to stop authorities from passing through on their way to rout peasants who had occupied a coffee plantation farther up the road, demanding that the land be divided among them.

As the bulldozer crashed through the roadblock, she and dozens of other women ran after the half-dozen trucks loaded with gunslingers, shouting at them to stop.

“They started firing,” she recalled. “We tried to stop them, but it was impossible. We are brave, but we could not,” Diaz said, her frustration showing through her stoic tone.

That was Dec. 1.

Three weeks later, soldiers and state police are filling in ditches and tearing down roadblocks that villagers like Diaz and her neighbors erected all over the state Monday.

This show of civil disobedience appears to be a new stage in the conflict that began nearly a year ago, when ski-masked rebels calling themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army occupied four county seats on Jan. 1, setting off 10 days of fighting that left at least 145 people dead.

With the new outbreak, the Zapatistas and their charismatic leader, Subcommander Marcos, are once again struggling with the government for the hearts of Mexicans weary of more than a decade of economic austerity.

Wednesday, about 300 soldiers sent into the area in a government show of force a day earlier were passing out canvas bags of sugary cereal, coffee and cans of fruit cocktail and tomato sauce to townspeople of Simojovel de Allende, a county seat that had been occupied--and looted--by Zapatista sympathizers for about six hours Monday.

Simojovel was added to the list of previously rebel-occupied towns now under guard by the Mexican army. Soldiers joined federal and state police in patching up highways where rebels had dug deep ditches to enforce their roadblocks and in patrolling the major highways in convoys to prevent guerrillas from reinstating barriers. There have been no direct confrontations this week between the army and the rebels, who, in a game of cat-and-mouse, withdrew when they learned soldiers were on the way.

Contributing to the tension surrounding the revived Zapatista activity, the Mexican Stock Exchange fell 3.1% as a result of a virtual devaluation that President Ernesto Zedillo blamed on the political uncertainty the rebels have caused.

“Chiapas will never be the same after (last) Jan. 1,” Gov. Eduardo Robledo Rincon said in his Dec. 8 inaugural speech. In many ways, the words appear truer in light of the peaceful resistance of recent days than when they were spoken.

He had, after all, won an allegedly fraud-ridden election Aug. 21 as the candidate of the same party that has ruled Mexico for 65 years, and he was being sworn in with Zedillo, a president elected the same day from the same party, as a witness.

The Zapatistas appeared to be locked in their jungle stronghold by a Mexican army cordon, and opposition party leaders that the rebels support barely roused 4,000 people to march on the capital protesting Robledo’s inauguration.

Government troops were guarding La Prusia, the coffee plantation whose invaders Diaz had tried in vain to protect. The peasant organization that had organized the invasion called the government response “a repressive wave that has bathed Chiapas soil in blood.”

“There have been no substantial improvements in health, no changes in education, no agricultural development, no loans, and we still are not listening to the Indian-language radio station the government promised,” Chiapas anthropologist and historian Andres Aubry told the newsmagazine Proceso shortly after Robledo became governor.

Then on Monday the Zapatistas declared an end to the cease-fire in effect since mid-January and showed that they had slipped through the military cordon. Chiapas roads were once again blocked by rebels in ski masks.

In some cases, the roadblocks appeared to be little more than a show of force. In others, barricades protected towns occupied for a few hours by Zapatista sympathizers, as in Simojovel, an amber-producing area in the foothills.

In Simojovel, townspeople said Wednesday, about 30 ski-masked, armed men in uniforms of dark green shirts and brown trousers entered the town about 5 a.m. At first, the rebels took up positions under the arches in front of City Hall and around the town square.

“They told us they were here in peace,” said Azalea Martinez, who owns a furniture store on the square. “But that was just so that we would open up and they could get in.”

Ten armed men entered her store and stole $5,000--the result of heavy Christmas shopping--a tape recorder and a watch from her home behind the shop. Three other stores were also robbed before the masked men turned their attention to the City Hall, burning police and tax records as well as typewriters. Then they loaded up several city cars with stolen merchandise and left at 11 a.m., townspeople said.

“I understand that they are in a struggle,” said Clara Velasco, a 42-year-old homemaker waiting for her package from the Mexican army outside City Hall. “What I cannot understand is what that has to do with what they did here.”

Many in the town refused to believe that the invaders were Zapatistas.

“They were not trained like soldiers,” said one man who refused to give his name. “When you tried to look them in the eye, they looked down, like peasants do.”

Still, looting under the Zapatista name feeds the rising tide of sentiment against the rebels in some quarters. When the guerrillas first appeared, demanding democracy and better living conditions for the state’s impoverished Indians, they elicited sympathy nationwide.

In the past year, that has eroded as they established links to leftist political parties.

“I think they should just crush them,” said one low-level Mexico City bureaucrat. “Zedillo should show them who wears the pants.”

Locally, billions of dollars have poured into this impoverished state in the past 11 months, most evident in newly paved roads. Still, the fundamental problems remain unchanged. If anything, positions have hardened as ranchers and Indian peasants lay claim to the same land, as in the case of La Prusia.

Peasants whose land had been declared a buffer zone for a biosphere reserve--meaning they cannot cut trees to clear fields--invaded the coffee plantation in this nation’s premier coffee-growing region, a triangle of land that cuts into Guatemala.

The plantation owner arrived with gunslingers, who retook the property, chasing invaders into the hills with gunfire. The government backed him up, sending in troops to guard his fields as harvest season approaches.

Throughout Chiapas, calls are increasingly heard for such law-and-order actions in what is perceived as a lawless state. “In many ways, I have been ineffectual,” the outgoing governor admitted in his annual message to the state legislature.

Nevertheless, the Zapatistas still have their supporters.

Small groups in Mexico City and the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez on Wednesday joined controversial Indian-rights activist Bishop Samuel Ruiz in hunger strikes, saying the government is not negotiating seriously with the rebels.

Even in El Salvador, hundreds of miles from the Zapatista area, peasants say they support the rebels.

“Since the Jan. 1 uprising, we have seen that the Indian comrades are no longer living in 1910,” the date of Mexico’s last major civil war, said Juan Ramon Cepeda, who lives here. “This is a clear signal to all peasants to not just bow down and let the state government walk over us. Peace has accomplished nothing.”

* FINANCIAL FALLOUT: Mexican stocks tumble. D1